Combining Answer Set Programming and Domain Heuristics for Solving Hard Industrial Problems (Application Paper)
This work addresses the problem of solving complex industrial problems for companies like Siemens, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ASP methods with added heuristics.
The paper tackled the challenge of solving hard industrial problems like the Partner Units Problem (PUP) and Combined Configuration Problem (CCP) using Answer Set Programming (ASP), which state-of-the-art ASP solvers could not handle. By integrating domain-specific heuristics into the ASP solver WASP, the approach found solutions for all real-world instances of PUP and CCP provided by Siemens.
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular logic programming paradigm that has been applied for solving a variety of complex problems. Among the most challenging real-world applications of ASP are two industrial problems defined by Siemens: the Partner Units Problem (PUP) and the Combined Configuration Problem (CCP). The hardest instances of PUP and CCP are out of reach for state-of-the-art ASP solvers. Experiments show that the performance of ASP solvers could be significantly improved by embedding domain-specific heuristics, but a proper effective integration of such criteria in off-the-shelf ASP implementations is not obvious. In this paper the combination of ASP and domain-specific heuristics is studied with the goal of effectively solving real-world problem instances of PUP and CCP. As a byproduct of this activity, the ASP solver WASP was extended with an interface that eases embedding new external heuristics in the solver. The evaluation shows that our domain-heuristic-driven ASP solver finds solutions for all the real-world instances of PUP and CCP ever provided by Siemens. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.